What right-wing scumbags say vs. what they actually do, PA edition

by Ken

I love this.

By way of background, I have an e-mail screen name that wound up being used mostly for political mailings, including campaign stuff. Do I have to tell you what an incredible amount of sludge it draws? I dread even looking at the list of new posts, and manage to do it periodically only so I can keep the sludge from piling up. Meaning that when I do attack the mail list, my mindset is delete, delete, delete.

I still don't know what prompted me to open this particular item. Now I see that Joe Sestak's name is in the "from" column, and that might have gotten me to open it, because I have a heap of respect for the admiral, but I could swear that I didn't notice his name there -- it wasn't until after I'd started looking at this wonderful graphic that I noticed the source. I didn't even realize Joe was running for the seat. Of course it's still a long way to 2016, but from what I know about Joe, we and the Senate need him a whole lot more than he needs any of us.

Once I started reading the graphic, I was simply delighted. This sort of thing is so damned characteristic of the Far Right -- they jump on issues their polling, or maybe their common sense, tells them are voter-friendly, in complete defiance of their entire political history. And since the public is by and large, shall we say, underinformed, and gets what it accepts as "information" mostly from sources that could hardly be less informative, the broad mass of voters have no idea what sorts of rotten scum they're not only electing but reelecting.

To anyone with a working brain it was obvious when Pat Toomey slithered into what had been that scumbag Arlen Specter's seat that he was an unusually toxic variety of "For Plutocrats Only" pondscum. And from my view of the campaign that Joe Sestak ran in 2010, first for the Democratic nomination, then in the general election, I thought it was terrific. Just brimming over with really carefully considered positions on a staggering array of issues that aren't the sexy hot-button ones often seem used to divert popular attention from real issues but in fact deal with the way our lives are actually led.

Naturally hardly anyone except me seems to have paid any attention. Just remember that the next time you hear someone complain about lack of substance in political campaigns. Come to think of it, this kind of complaint seems itself to have become old-fashioned. More and more, the country seems to accept that  campaigns are all about handicapping the horse races amid psychotic blithering about issues that have some reality but not in the form that the blitherers blither about, which is mostly more noise from the Great Right-Wing Noise Machine.

Which is just a fancy round-about way of saying, again, that I really love this chart, all the more welcome now that the media seem to have acquiesced to the general elimination of any consideration of reality or real life in our political campaigns, giving in in large part to the right-wing demand that reality be outlawed, to be replaced by their elaborate grid of delusions and lies. In fairness, the response of official Democratic organs like the Senate House campaign committees is mostly: If you want lies and delusions, we can give you those too, even if ours, being second-hand, are kind of wrinkly and worn.

Why is why I'm that much more grateful for a voice trying to be heard saying, "Hey, folks, here's just a bit of a reality check."


UPDATE: IF YOU WANT TO CONTRIBUTE --

I should have included the link if you want to contribute to Joe Sestak's challenge to Senator Toomey. Here it is.

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